On November 15th, In Vivo - The Creek Series, Reflections on the Heart of the City, an exhibition of paintings by Dubliner Niamh Cunningham will be opened by the Ambassador Tom Russell at a reception hosted by the Art Attack gallery off Al Wasl Road from 7:30-10:30pm. The exhibition will run until November 27th. Click here for more details. 

Niamh believes that Dubai Creek is an affirmative symbol of life, with its chugging abras and dhows, the sense of destination and the joining of people and places. She has previously exhibited in Tokyo and Dublin, and has participated in public art projects in Dubai such as the Arabian Horse Project and the Flight of the Falcons. Her influences include Leon Kossof, David Bomberg, Frank Auerbach for their use of impasto oils and approach to observation and response. 

Read the review below by Val Kwann, Exhibitions Director of Dubai International Art Centre DIAC.

It sometimes happens that the artist’s creative bud, that inner self that makes necessity of art, stays closed, swelling only slowly, well into a mature life. It’s was always there of course, from that moment of childhood awareness when the language of the visual made sudden sense and was wonderful. Life’s distractions merely tidied it away. In Niamh Cunningham’s case the full blown artist flowers as a remarkable product of Dubai.

A new life, a new world and the shock of so many  cultures and energies all melding into one- who among us did not feel that kick when first we walked out of the airport door? The result, for this exceptional talent, is that the bud is opened and flowering fully now for the first time in an independent exhibition, with a remarkable collection of works that take us to the heart of the city’s life, to its physical beginning and its constant centre, on the Creek side.

The exhibition, entitled “In Vivo”, (meaning the study of something within a living organism) takes us down to the water, to water level, our feet are almost wet, amid the scurrying abras, the wheeling birds and the milling, jostling crowds. It focuses our attention on the textures, colours, lights and darks of this ever changing energy. We see the whole, the unstoppable, the thing that Dubai is, and always has been. The pictures are full of detail and movement, thickly encrusted with paint, encrusted with the streets, the crowds, the smells and the sounds of Deira-side. Worker, tourist, Indian, Arab, brown skin and white, movement and stillness, hurry and calm, a thousand languages the life force of a uniquely simulating place simmers in this work. Niamh Cunningham gives us a moment amid the rush and hurry to really see, as she does, the many lives and the one, the day-dreams and the reality. She takes the water of Dubai and lets it stream through the life-force of her work, so that we may share the pleasure and understand the truth of her artist’s fully open eye.

Click here for a location map:

http://www.artattackgallery.net/niamhcunningham-m-24.html